Phono Stage - The great analog tragedy

Pani, I don't know what country you live in, but in the USA, when LOMC cartridges were first introduced in the early to mid 70s, most audiophiles owned phono stages with only MM levels of gain.  Everyone needed a gain booster of some kind in order to appreciate the new idea in cartridges.  At that point in time, the first products in the US market were not SUTs, as I recall.  They were "head amps" or "pre-preamps", most prominently I remember the one marketed by Mark Levinson and designed by John Curl, the JC1.  For tube aficionados there was also the Counterpoint SA2, eventually. I owned one; it was noisy but good sounding. SUTs came along later, at least here in the US. Someone mentioned the MFA Luminescence C.  I owned two of them (consecutively, not both at the same time).  While it was "good", it would not hold a candle to any of the more modern phono stages I have owned and used extensively, to include Raul's 3160 Phonolinepreamp, the Atma-sphere MP1, the Silvaweld SH550, the Manley Steelhead.  Not that any of these could be regarded as recent designs, if you define "recent" with a 5-year envelope. Sometimes nostalgia makes us see with rose-colored glasses. But on the other hand, RIAA has not changed and the subject of how to effect the RIAA filter has been done to death (with resistors and capacitors, or with R, C, and inductors, or with inductors and resistors, or in the digital domain, or using an IC which may effect any of the preceding components to get the job done).  So, yes, there has to be some me-too-ism in the most modern designs. So why is there a bee in your bonnet?

I remember attending a Boston Audio Society meeting in the late 70s at which Tomlinson Holman spoke on what prompted him to re-think his ideas on phono preamp design, which led to the Advent 300 receiver's much ballyhooed MM section, and later the full-blown version in the Apt/Holman preamp.  

He was testing an unnamed "standard solid state preamp" versus that of a Dynaco PAS tube preamp and found that the HF overload characteristics on the tube preamp were far better.  He then focused on designing a SS circuit that matched the characteristics of the PAS closely, which went into the Model 300.  Curiously, this vignette is absent from the excellent history linked above by djspinner...West Coast bias?

It's no secret that tube phono stages tend to have much higher phono overload tolerance compared to SS ones. However, that is rarely a problem when the driving cartridge is a typical LOMC type.  It's when you pair a SS phono with an MM or high output MI cartridge that overload problems can arise.

Would someone please elucidate as to the point of this discussion?

Do things really need to advance so quick? I picked up a new transimpedance phono and it's been decent, but it's about to get replaced by a used Nagra VPS that's what, a 15 year old design that's sonically much better in all aspects. Also the cost to build new, borrowing from older designs, and not much better seems to be getting out of hand with price at least from a working class man like myself.